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An interesting little piece of photography trivia…

While cruising around looking for something to write about for today’s post, I stumbled upon an interesting little manual that I’m sure very few of you have seen.

That’s right, Zeiss/Ikon, owned in part by Carl Zeiss, the same name branded on some high-end lenses, wrote a manual on exposure times for the up-and-coming photographer. This was supposed to help you figure out exactly how long you needed to expose your film when getting a shot. Various factors such as time of year, time of day, how sunny it was, and if you were exposing film or a dry plate are required in the equation to figure out what your best exposure time will be. The person who developed the equation that governed this whole process was Dr. Max Leo. Now, having to carry around a manual or do mathematics in your head to get a good shot is something no one has to do anymore. However, I wonder how much — if any — of this information is encoded into digital camera settings. Looks like I’ll have some more research to do into this.